AMD has agreed to acquire AI model research firm World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion. World Labs co-founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2025, pending regulatory approval.

What does AMD acquire?

World Labs develops spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct, and simulate interactive 3D environments. Unlike text-focused large language models, these systems build or simulate three-dimensional scenes — a capability with applications in robotics, simulation, and embodied AI.

The company's first commercial product, Marble, launched late last year. Marble creates persistent, downloadable 3D worlds from source material. World Labs' latest model, Atlas, will power future versions of Marble, the company says.

Li will continue leading World Labs alongside co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall after assuming her AMD role.

Why does Li move in-house?

In a joint statement, Su said building compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires "a deep understanding of how models are evolving." Li added that advancing the technology "requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute."

Li elaborated in a separate post that World Labs needs to get "closer to the hardware," without which AI is "hobbled in efficiency."

Before founding World Labs, Li led the ImageNet project in the 2010s, served as chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud, and directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Several institutions have referred to her as the "Godmother of AI."

How deep does the prior relationship run?

AMD invested in World Labs' $1 billion funding round in February 2025. During Su's CES keynote in January, Li said parts of World Labs' model already ran on AMD Instinct accelerators, with her team using both Instinct hardware and the ROCm software stack to optimize performance.

AMD framed World Labs as one of its showcase customers, saying the acquisition will "help shape its future technology roadmaps." The companies stated the deal will strengthen an "open AI ecosystem," with World Labs reaffirming its commitment to "widely accessible open models."

How does this fit AMD's M&A history?

The World Labs transaction ranks as AMD's second-largest acquisition, behind only the $50 billion Xilinx deal that closed in 2022. AMD's other major purchases have been smaller:

• ATI: $5.4 billion (2006)
• ZT Systems: $4.9 billion (2025)
• Pensando: $1.9 billion (2022)

Where does Nvidia sit?

Nvidia also participated in World Labs' February funding round. The rival chipmaker has been developing Cosmos, its own family of open-source world models, and earlier this month agreed to acquire open-model host Hugging Face for $12.93 billion.

The competitive context clarifies why AMD moved to bring model expertise in-house. Spatial intelligence and world-model workloads constitute a growing compute category that both chipmakers now treat as strategically critical, with hardware-roadmap decisions increasingly tied to the requirements of 3D scene generation and simulation.

The transaction will be finalized once it passes the usual regulatory hurdles, with both companies pointing to continued investment in open model development as a core element of the combined roadmap.